Notes tagged with Active Communication

Photographer Martin John Callanan, a Teaching Fellow at the University College (London), an intense researcher, Editor of Leonardo Electronic Almanac and Publisher at a online artworks site called Merkske. That’s the kind of informed background he comes from.

His work over the years has included translations of “active communication data into music; freezing in time the earth’s water system; writing thousands of letters; capturing newspapers from around the world as they are published; taming wind onto the internet and broadcasting his precise physical location live for over two years.”

With scores of published and displayed works in Europe, The Americas, Asia and Australia, we loved his absolutely tech savvy project – The Fundamental Units.

With the bitcoins being all the rage and global economies facing a currency crisis here and there, countries constantly revamp or abolish their lowest denominations time and again.

Categorized as “worthless coins” in the economic setup, Callanan initiated to save all such currencies from across 166 countries. Not by taking up a anti-wipeout campaign but capturing these lost coins with his lens.

The creative series was first kickstarted with the works of Horrach Moya Gallery. The artist teamed up with the National Physical Laboratory(NPL) in U.K, that boasts off having Europe’s best 3D microscope.

The coins are photographed with 4,000 individual exposures and processed over a span of three days to produce these marvellous single photogrraphs shown below. Each of them weighs approximately 400 megapixels and measures 1.2X1.2 meteres, a good 3.9 square feet.

Martin opines that the high defination photography reveals the the “material makeup of the coin, marks and traces from their use as tokens of exchange.”

An interesting tidbit about currencies before you can check out these beautiful reproduction of coins from Australia, Chile, The Euro, Mynamar, Kingdom Of Swaziland.

Every coin the US State Treasury mints to produce 1 cent coin costs them 2 cents. Its best to undesratnd the value of the metal and the human resources that go into producing a small denomination of the currency. With people dealing everyday in millions and billions, probably the value of a cent goes unrecognized.

During The Place’s biennial Choreodrome research and development project for choreographers there will be three presentations given in the Robin Howard Dance Theatre on different aspects of creativity. The series involves theatre, performance and live artists working on the far edge of choreographic practice, and are designed to inspire new conversations about choreography, movement and performance. The seminars are open and free to all who wish to attend.

Martin John Callanan is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans numerous mediums and engages both emerging and commonplace technology (http://greyisgood.eu). His work has included translating active communication data into music; freezing in time the earth’s water system; tampering with banknotes; writing thousands of letters; capturing newspapers from around the world as they are published; taming wind onto the internet and broadcasting his precise physical location live for over two years.

Martin’s work is always decidedly deadpan and served with a dash of ennui. Some of his more well-known pieces include the ambient audio installation Sonification of You, the meta-news aggregator I Wanted to See All the News From Today and Text Trends, which abstracts the casual manner in which we receive, scan and process information and language on a daily basis.

Martin is currently Artist in Residence at UCL Environment Institute and Teaching Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art UCL.

He will discuss the power of narrative and the role of performance and metaphor within his work. You will be asked to question whether the artist or audience is the real performer: where and when the performance really takes place.